the X Strike Force, as you may know, is the team responsible for thepackages forming the X Window System. That means the X server, allvideo and input device drivers, as well as client libraries and variousclient applications.
Hi everyone,

the X Strike Force, as you may know, is the team responsible for thepackages forming the X Window System. That means the X server, allvideo and input device drivers, as well as client libraries and variousclient applications.

Status——Over the Lenny release cycle, the configuration of the Xorg server hasbeen considerably simplified. In many cases the only configurationneeded is to set the desired keymap.We've also switched to the new “intel” driver, which handles modesettingnatively, instead of “i810″. This driver, as well as “radeon” and “nv”,provide the RandR 1.2 extension to configure video output at runtime.One of the nice things that happened recently is the packaging of the“nouveau” driver[0] (thanks to Chris Lamb and Matthew Johnson), areverse-engineering effort for nVidia cards. It's not release-qualityyet, so won't be part of lenny, but please go and test it inexperimental! The “openchrome” driver has also been packaged (thanks toRaphael Geissert) to support via chipsets instead of the unmaintained“via” driver.

Next steps———-xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 are being prepared in experimental, andwill hit sid soon after the lenny release.At around the same time, we'd like to enable hotplugging of inputdevices, and their configuration through hal. This means using the“evdev” driver for mice and keyboards instead of the traditional “mouse”and “keyboard” drivers, which will for example use of different keymapsfor different keyboards, per-device configuration (not only statically,but also at runtime), etc./usr/share/doc/hal/examples/10-x11-input.fdi and/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi in the hal packagecontain an example config, which you can modify to suit your needs andinstall in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ to get a feel for this.

Help needed———–A quick look at [1] will show you that the XSF is responsible for quitea few packages. A quick look at [2] will show you that those packagesneed help.

Some of the packages or areas have dedicated maintainers, and aremaintained better than the rest. But we need more people to handle therest of the packages: we have hardly enough manpower to do basic bugtriaging and keep up with upstream, but most bugs don't get forwardedupstream or otherwise addressed.

We would love to hear from people interested in improving this state.You don't need to know much about X to help, just be willing to learn abit and sometimes dig in unholy C code. The code base is pretty big,but it's quite easy to ignore the parts one doesn't understand. It's avery good opportunity to learn many very fun things going fromhardware-dependent graphic programming (modesetting, DRI, …) to fancyuser interfaces (Compositing/Compiz, RandR 1.2, …). X is alsoseverely lacking documentation, so work on that front is very muchneeded.

You don't need to be a DD, anyone who's interested is welcome. You can reachus on #debian-x on irc.debian.org, or on debian-x@lists.debian.org.

The upstream developers are friendly and responsive, which is a big helpfor a stretched team such as ours. And it's even very easy to getinvolved upstream if you feel like contributing some patches.